Christa Pike was “ruthless, without any remorse, almost giddy” when describing to cops how she committed the brutal murder that landed her on death row, the police chief who handled her case told The Post.
Pike, 50, made headlines around the world when she became the first ever inmate in the US to survive after being given the lethal injection on Sept. 30 in Tennessee.
She was sentenced to death for the sadistic killing of her 19-year-old Job Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in Jan. 1995, in Knoxville.
Former Knoxville chief of police Phil Keith was asked in a new documentary by The Post on Pike’s horrific crime what it had been like to see her in the interrogation room.
“I heard somebody that was ruthless, without any remorse, almost giddy,” Keith recalled.
“You know, she was describing what took place, like, almost the sense that she was bragging about it.”
Pike lured Slemmer to her death in a fit of jealousy because she suspected the victim wanted to steal her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.
The pair took Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus — while Pike’s friend acted as lookout — and tortured her with a meat cleaver and box cutter and cut a pentagram into her chest.
At the end of the half-hour-long terror, Pike bashed Slemmer’s head in with a large chunk of asphalt and then kept a piece of her skull as a sick souvenir.
Former top cop Keith said that the scene was so shocking that even veteran detectives working the case were stunned by what they found.
Here’s the latest on the botched execution of Tennessee murderer Christa Pike:
“I was accustomed to seeing that kind of gore, if you will, but the brutality was different,” he told The Post.
“You know, the visual scene of it, it was so shocking, and I could tell, when I first walked up – there’s two seasoned guys there, they got 50 or 60 years of homicide investigations under their belt, and I could tell, looking at their eyes and just their expressions, that they were disgusted with what they saw.”
Pike was rushed to hospital after surviving two doses of pentobarbital allegedly administered with at least 10 needles during her botched execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
She remained unconscious in the days after the bungled attempt and her legal team believed on Oct. 5 that she was brain dead and would be taken off life support the following day.
Instead, she woke up and, 10 days after the bungled execution, was discharged from hospital and returned to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center (DJRC), formerly known as the Tennessee Prison for Women.
Her lawyers said last week that she is now speaking in full sentences.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee paused all remaining executions this year following the fiasco and ordered an independent review into what went wrong.
The Volunteer State’s prison boss, Frank Strada, resigned after the botched injections, noting it was “in the best interest of Tennesseans.”
Pike’s legal team has demanded that her sentence be commuted, saying she has “endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”
